ABSTRACT
The arguments considered in Chapter 6 were not least intended to make it clear why Heidegger’s approaches to philosophy are now becoming an inescapable part even of debates in the analytical philosophy of language. Gadamer’s perhaps rather too sympathetic characterisation cited below can help us to move now from a primarily analytical demonstration of the inescapability of Heidegger’s questions for any consideration of truth in modern philosophy, to a consideration of the Heidegger whose effects on the self-understanding of the modern world are evident in the most diverse debates, and whose reflections on truth and art are still germane to any serious literary theory. Gadamer claims that what motivated Heidegger was the
question how this finite, irrelevant human existence, which is certain of its death, could understand itself in its being despite its own evanescence, and indeed understand itself as a being which is not a privation, a lack, a merely passing pilgrimage of the citizen of the earth through this life to a participation in the eternity of the divine.
(Gadamer 1987 p. 182)